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Palm's upcoming Treo 700p, the company's first new Palm Os smartphone in a long time, will be released on May 28th by Sprint, according to a poster on the TreoCentral message board reports PalmInfocenter.

The rumor confirms earlier speculation about the possible due date of the eagerly anticipated communicator. Evidence cited includes and internal Sprint store document, which the forum member photocopied and posted (see image).

As many have pointed out, it is strange that the due date, May 28th, falls on a Saturday; but that could simply be a general time frame not meant to serve as a specific date.

The 700p should run on the ever increasingly long-in-the-tooth Palm OS Garnet (version 5.4.9), which Palm finesses with its own interface and under-the-hood tweaks-While platform developer PalmSource continues to support the Palm OS, it will no longer release upgrades, concentrating on the ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP) moving forward.

With 700p, there should be high-speed EV-DO (400 to 700 kbps) networking, a must for Palm fans itching for Treo functionality but dreading the move to Windows Mobile and the 700w. Additional supposed features include a 312 MHz Intel XScale processor, a 320 x 320 pixel high resolution display, Bluetooth (with dial up networking modem support), about 63 MB of free memory (128 MB total), and a 1.3 megapixel camera.

Palm should deliver FAT32 driver support with this device, a "fast mode" in the blazer Web browser, and a NVFS dbCache size of 18,431 kb; a first for the company. NVFS is what allows data to survive in the event of a complete power drain.